Earlier today, April 17, 2026, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the Strait of Hormuz is now completely open for commercial traffic for the remainder of the current ceasefire. The announcement, reported by Bloomberg within the hour, marks the first real signal that the seven-week disruption to global energy flows is ending.
For small and mid-size business owners, this is not just a geopolitical headline. It is an economic inflection point that directly affects oil prices, inflation expectations, interest rates, credit availability, and the broader M&A environment. The decisions you make in the next sixty to ninety days will be shaped by what happens to the global economy now that the chokepoint responsible for roughly one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil trade is flowing again.
If you have been thinking about selling your business, refinancing, raising capital, or simply planning for the next twelve months, you need to understand what just changed and why the next ninety days matter more than the last ninety did.
What Actually Happened
The war began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel struck Iranian targets. Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz to foreign shipping. The closure triggered the largest disruption to global oil supply in history, with the International Energy Agency reporting that global supply fell by 10.1 million barrels per day in March. Physical crude prices surged toward $150 per barrel. Refined product prices, particularly middle distillates used for diesel and jet fuel, hit all-time highs.
A two-week ceasefire was announced on April 7. Talks in Islamabad failed over the following weekend, and on April 13 the U.S. imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports. Oil prices remained elevated near $100 per barrel through this week.
Today’s announcement changes that trajectory. Iran has stated that passage is permitted during the ceasefire under Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps management, with a transit fee structure to be administered jointly with Oman after the ceasefire ends. The arrangement is fragile. But for the first time since late February, commercial tankers have a clear legal path through the waterway.
Markets will take days to fully digest what this means. But the direction of travel on several key business variables is now clear.
What This Shifts For The Economy
For small business owners, four things matter more than the headline.
Energy prices. The surge to $150 per barrel was not just a commodity story. It flowed through to diesel, jet fuel, plastics, fertilizer, shipping costs, and ultimately to consumer prices. With the strait reopening, the supply shock begins to unwind. JPMorgan analysts noted this week that the last tanker to clear Hormuz before the closure was expected to reach its destination around April 20, which is when pre-closure barrels would be fully exhausted from the global supply chain. Today’s announcement came just ahead of that deadline. If flows normalize quickly, the worst-case inflation scenario many were pricing in can be taken off the table.
Inflation and Fed policy. The Federal Reserve cut rates three times in 2025 for a total of 75 basis points. Going into 2026, further cuts were expected. The oil shock from the Hormuz closure threatened to stall or reverse that path. A reopening removes that obstacle. If energy prices stabilize, the Fed retains room to continue easing, which directly affects the cost of acquisition financing, working capital lines, and every other form of debt a business relies on.
Credit availability. Lenders tighten during crises. Private credit desks slow commitments, banks increase scrutiny on borrowers, and acquisition financing becomes harder to close on reasonable terms. A stabilizing geopolitical backdrop reopens those conversations. Deals that were paused in March can be restarted in May.
CEO confidence. The Conference Board Measure of CEO Confidence had been recovering through late 2025, reaching 48% in Q4. The Iran war clearly set that back. But confidence is restored more quickly than it is destroyed, particularly when the resolution comes faster than markets feared. Confidence drives M&A. When executives believe the next twelve months will be better than the last twelve, they make acquisition decisions they had been postponing.
What This Means For M&A Specifically
This week also delivered a second data point that matters. On April 15, Capstone Partners released its 2025 Middle Market M&A Valuations Index. Average purchase multiples held at 9.8x EV/EBITDA through 2025. Q1 2025 deal volume was up 10.3% year over year. Deal values were up 21.2%. Most advisors expected stable or modestly higher multiples entering 2026.
That report was written before the Iran war. It was also written before today’s announcement that the war’s most economically disruptive element is being unwound. The combination of a fundamentally constructive M&A backdrop and a rapid de-escalation of the biggest macro risk on the table points toward a very specific window opening in Q2 and Q3 of 2026.
Here is the practical read. Business owners who were planning a sale process in the first half of 2026 and paused when the war started now have to decide whether to restart. Many will. Deal activity that was frozen in March will flow back into the market over the next sixty to ninety days. Buyers who were sitting on capital will move quickly to deploy it, because they know that a fragile ceasefire could break again and they want to close before the next disruption.
For sellers, this creates a narrow, high-quality window. The sellers who are ready to move will capture it. The sellers who need six months to get their financials in shape will miss it.
The Preparation Gap Most Business Owners Don’t Recognize
Here is the uncomfortable truth about M&A valuation. The 9.8x average is not what every seller gets. It is what sellers who are ready to sell get.
There are always two valuations in any transaction. There is the valuation a buyer assigns based on the story a seller tells. And there is the valuation a buyer is willing to pay after six weeks of due diligence. The gap between those two numbers can be 30% or more. Every surprise a buyer finds during diligence either shaves price, expands escrow, extends earn-out, or kills the deal. Surprises in diligence almost always favor the buyer, because by that point the seller has emotionally and practically committed to selling.
When a buyer’s advisor opens your books, they are trying to answer a handful of specific questions. Can I trust the revenue number? Are the margins real, or are they inflated by missing expenses or inconsistent accounting? What are the actual working capital requirements month to month? Which customers actually drive the profit? What happens to the business if the owner walks away on closing day?
Answering those questions requires clean, consistent, reconciled financials going back two to three years. In most small businesses, that starting point does not exist. The books are close enough for tax purposes, which is a very different standard than close enough for a buyer’s quality of earnings analysis.
What Financial Readiness Actually Looks Like
If you are thinking about putting your business on the market in the next six to eighteen months, four specific workstreams matter more than anything else.
Catch-up bookkeeping. If your books are more than thirty days behind, or if the last two years contain unreconciled accounts, unclassified transactions, or year-end adjustments without clear documentation, a buyer’s advisor will see it immediately. The only way to fix it is to go back, month by month, and rebuild. A catch-up bookkeeping service works backward through your financial history to reconstruct an accurate, complete picture of your business finances. This is the foundation. Nothing else matters if this step is skipped.
Bookkeeping cleanup before a business sale. This is a specific discipline distinct from ongoing bookkeeping. The goal is not just accuracy going forward, but producing a clean, defensible history that tells a consistent story. That means reclassifying miscategorized expenses, separating personal expenses from business expenses (a common issue in owner-operated businesses), documenting one-time events so they can be normalized in the EBITDA calculation, and eliminating the reconciliation gaps that give buyers a reason to reduce the price.
A quality of earnings report for a small business. Whether produced by a seller in anticipation of a sale or by a buyer’s advisor during diligence, the QoE strips adjusted EBITDA down to what a buyer will actually underwrite. It normalizes for one-time events, owner compensation, related-party transactions, and accounting policy inconsistencies. Sellers who commission their own sell-side QoE before going to market consistently command higher valuations, close faster, and retain more of the purchase price outside of escrow.
A fractional CFO for your small business. This becomes increasingly valuable as a sale approaches. The role is not bookkeeping. The role is turning clean bookkeeping into a strategic narrative: three-year trend analysis, customer profitability breakdown, working capital forecast, normalized EBITDA bridge, and the kind of financial commentary buyers expect from businesses willing to command a premium. Most small business owners do not need a full-time CFO. They do need someone operating at that level during the twelve to eighteen months before a transaction.
The Realistic Timeline From Decision To Closing
The most common mistake business owners make is underestimating the runway. If your books are already clean and your financial reporting is already consistent, you can run a sale process in six to nine months from first advisor meeting to closing. Almost no business starts there.
A realistic preparation timeline for a small or lower middle market business running on adequate but not sale-grade financials looks like this.
Months one through three are catch-up bookkeeping to close historical gaps, reconciliation of balance sheet accounts, cleanup of the chart of accounts, and separation of personal and business expenses. This is the foundation work and cannot be skipped.
Months three through six are consistent monthly close processes with real reconciliations, documentation of revenue recognition policies, and building out the management reporting package a buyer’s advisor will expect: trailing twelve month P&L by month, segment or customer profitability, and working capital analysis.
Months six through twelve are the strategic financial work that supports valuation. This is typically where a fractional CFO engagement starts. EBITDA normalization schedules. Customer concentration analysis. Pipeline and backlog documentation. Sell-side QoE preparation, or at minimum internal QoE-ready financials.
Months twelve through eighteen are the sale process itself. Confidential information memorandum. Buyer outreach. Management presentations. Due diligence. Negotiation. Closing.
Business owners who start this work eighteen months before they want to sell tend to close on their original timeline. Business owners who start it three months out tend to push their timeline back, accept a materially lower valuation, or pull the process and start over.
What Sellers Who Skip The Preparation Actually Lose
It is worth putting specific numbers on what poor financial preparation costs at sale.
Purchase price reductions. Every issue a buyer finds during diligence is leverage to reduce price. A missing reconciliation. An unexplained revenue spike. A customer concentration question that cannot be answered with data. Each item typically costs between 2% and 10% of enterprise value, and they compound.
Increased escrow and holdback. Buyers protect themselves by holding back a portion of the purchase price, often for twelve to twenty-four months. The weaker the financial documentation, the larger the escrow. Clean, defensible financials typically see escrows of 5% to 10%. Messy financials push escrows to 15% or 20% or higher.
Extended earn-outs. When buyers cannot underwrite historical performance with confidence, they shift risk to the seller through earn-outs tied to post-closing results. An earn-out is not a bonus. It is a portion of the purchase price the seller may or may not receive, and in practice most earn-outs pay out at less than the targeted amount.
Dead deals. This is the worst outcome and more common than most business owners realize. A deal that dies in diligence does not simply reset to the next buyer. It burns six to twelve months of the seller’s time, creates a market signal that something is wrong with the business, and creates legal and advisory fees that are not recoverable. Buyers talk to each other. A deal that died at one firm rarely gets a fresh look from the next.
The common thread across every one of those outcomes is financial preparation. Or rather, its absence.
The Bottom Line
The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz today is the single most bullish signal for the U.S. M&A environment in the last seven weeks. Energy prices can normalize. Inflation risk comes down. The Fed retains room to keep cutting. Credit availability loosens. CEO confidence recovers. Deals that were paused in March start flowing again in May.
The question for business owners is not whether the window is opening. It is whether you will be ready to walk through it.
Buyers are paying 9.8x for middle-market assets, and they are paying those multiples to sellers who can prove their numbers, not to sellers who hope to. Every issue found in diligence shifts price, escrow, and terms in favor of the buyer. The runway to fix those issues is not ninety days. It is twelve to eighteen months of deliberate work: catch-up bookkeeping to close historical gaps, consistent monthly closes, a defensible normalized EBITDA, and a quality of earnings report you commission rather than one a buyer’s advisor commissions to poke holes in your story.
Today’s news is a gift to sellers who are already prepared. For everyone else, it is a starting gun.
The best time to have started preparing was eighteen months ago. The second best time is this week.
MB Accounting Group provides bookkeeping cleanup before business sale, quality of earnings preparation, catch-up bookkeeping, and fractional CFO services for small and mid-size businesses preparing for a transaction. If you are thinking about a sale in the next one to three years and want to know where your financials stand today, schedule a conversation with our team and we will give you a clear, honest assessment of what it will take to be ready.
MB Accounting Group specializes in bookkeeping cleanup before business sale, quality of earnings preparation, accounting due diligence support, and fractional CFO services for small business owners across the United States.